Living Well

  • Crown

    Crown

    I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.  Not even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when the sky was empty of planes and no one knew just what horror might come next.  Back then, it took a few days for me to feel safe and appropriate about bringing my babies out for a…

  • Four Words

    Four Words

    One of my favorite authors featured a short video on her Instagram last week and I cannot stop thinking about it.  In an interview, Kate Bowler speaks about her initial steps into the bewildering and scary journey of stage four cancer and she highlights an interaction with one of her nurses, Meg.  At the time,…

  • Bean

    Bean

    Oh friends, watch this bean. It was dead, basically, the by-product of an earlier productive and blossoming life.  Found itself dried out and useless, buried in the quiet and the dark.  It stayed like that for a long time. Then something within itself started breaking and shifting.  Preprogrammed for growth, it sent out roots and…

  • Walk – 2020

    Walk – 2020

    For the past several years on New Year’s Eve, our sweet hosts have pulled out a sheet of cardboard on which everyone writes their goals for the year ahead in permanent sharpie.  One year I wrote that I would find our dog, Bailey, and I did. Another year I wrote that I would run a…

  • Unfold

    Unfold

    I’ll just say it: like so many of you who came before, I’m now obsessed with The Great British Baking Show.  I didn’t think I’d like it because I’m much more cook than baker. I aim toward flavor, texture and contrast and away from precision, but there’s something about the tone of the show, the…

  • Breath

    Breath

    As I settled on my yoga mat before class, the room echoed the static dissonance in my head. One classmate had just moved her only child into college and was trying to make sense of her own new landscape, another had a friend suffering deeply the loss of two grandchildren and was facing the reality…

  • Small

    Small

    I met and held the teeniest, tiniest, most perfect baby today. She was so impossibly light, both in luminescence and weight that it was hard to believe I was holding a real live person; she is so small. As a Mom of college kids, it’s easy to forget. My two babies were small once, just…

  • Move

    Move

    On our street, we bring treats to new neighbors. I remember thirteen years ago, walking with my then six-year old daughter a few doors down to leave a wrapped banana bread on a covered porch in the rain. We couldn’t have known then that our new neighbors would become our dear friends, couldn’t have guessed…

  • Melt

    “We’re not going to do the snowman song today, are we?” a four-year old boy asked me as I was setting up for music class at the local children’s museum. I wasn’t clear on what he said or meant in the moment, but then his Mom apologetically reminded me about a class about four weeks…

  • Dreams

    Dreams

    I’ve had some weird dreams lately. I dreamt that Lin-Manuel Miranda and I had coffee and we danced in the street and he brought me into a ticket booth and got me on-stage seating for Les Miserables that night. I dreamt that Jose Andres and Tina Fey almost came to fisticuffs in the street, but…